UC San Diego

This dissertation focuses on the formation of multiethnic Pan-Asianism in modern art in Manchuria under the Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century. Responding to the rapidly changing political conditions from the era of the informal empire (1906–⁠1932) to the Manchukuo period (1932–1945), artists of settler and local communities sought to transform artistic practice by bringing their colonial and native identities into the state-endorsed visual productions. Rather than viewing the art of Manchukuo as a dark valley of wartime stagnation or as a confrontation/assimilation between the colonized and the colonizer, my approach is to recover the historical moment when the notion of transnational modernity in art was shaped, contested, and reappropriated not only by state actors but by unstable, multi-dimensional social relations. I pay special attention to the state art exhibitions in Manchukuo as the last piece of Japan’s intra-imperial salon network involving colonial Korea and Taiwan, which exposed and reproduced the subjugation and dynamics of intersectional identities: race, ethnicity, genealogy, gender, and class. Case studies throughout four chapters demonstrate how the field of power in the art scene shifted from “cosmopolitan” Dalian to “ultra-modern” Changchun after the birth of Manchukuo in 1932, and how artists selectively claimed their Asiatic traditional and modern identities amid the political shift. The first chapter examines the development of metropolitan art productions in Dalian shaped by settler communities under powerful railway imperialism and local government by appropriating visual spectacles of Chinese labor and ethnic culture. The second chapter explores the deployment of the state art exhibition in Changchun and the anti-state exhibition in Fengtian, which revealed multifaceted interactions between Japanese and Chinese. The third chapter provides a case study of settler artist Kai Mihachirō (1903–1979) and his research on Manchurian folklore and folk arts in demonstrating how Manchukuo’s local characters were appropriated by Japanese settlers and the state in classifying, collecting, and curating races. In the fourth chapter, I address Manchukuo’s machine aesthetics, featured in the state art exhibitions, as an embodiment of Pan-Asian modernity and Japanese imperialism engendered by advanced technology and science, which became mobilized as wartime rhetoric.